SEO Archives - Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog

Obtaining “white hat” SEO links is really only in part about the link itself. It’s also about serving the audience and community of the site that links to you … and real relationships.

People should link to you because you have earned the link, not because you bought or bartered for it.

It is our opinion that link building is less about the number of links and more about the number of linking domains from within your industry. Quality over quantity always.

Our list of 50 ways to get quality SEO backlinks is different from other link-building-idea lists in one important way. We stay focused on how you can add value for your ultimate audience through your website.

The relationship between a business and its SEO consulting firm is a delicate balance of give and take.

In order for an SEO strategy to deliver the best results, the SEO consultant must give accurate and useful recommendations, and the client must take that guidance and implement those recommendations.

This is a team effort where the consultant solves problems and mentors the client, and the client then learns and implements. Seems fairly straightforward, but it’s not always so.

You have no doubt experienced this in your business. A project can have great energy at the outset. But as time passes, progress can be delayed and momentum stalled for a variety of reasons.

Here’s the good news: We’ve observed that there are five common roadblocks affecting SEO consulting projects that can absolutely be surpassed — once you know how to identify and push through them. In this article, I’ll go over the five common issues that threaten an SEO consulting project’s success AND how a business can overcome them:

On 12th February 2018, Dhananjay Kumar from Max Life Insurance​ fulfilled his five-year long dream of meeting Bruce Clay in person. Dhananjay, who was the lucky winner of Bruce Clay India’s SEO Contest, arrived at BCI’s Gurgaon office to claim his prize — an exclusive 30-minute Q&A session with the Father of SEO, Bruce Clay.

Dhananjay, who calls himself a big fan of Bruce Clay, is passionate about SEO. With an eager clasp of hands and the words “can’t wait to get started,” he shot off questions for Bruce, which the SEO guru answered with his characteristic composure and just the right dose of humor!

The good news: Showing up in Google’s search engine can be extremely beneficial to your local business.

The bad news: Google doesn’t care if you rank high or low. It cares only that there are quality results that answer the query to the total satisfaction of the searcher.

So the pressing question is, how do you rank higher on Google Maps and Google local search results? Improving your local search rankings is possible, and the results are very real. A Google study found that:

4 in 5 consumers use search engines to find local information.

50 percent of local smartphone searches lead to a store visit in less than a day.

18 percent of local searches on a smartphone result in a sale within a day.

In 2016, Google reported that 20% of the queries it gets today are voice searches. (Source: SearchEngineLand)

Around the same time, Mary Meeker shared a prediction that by 2020, 50% of searches will be voice or visually based. (Source: Recode)

If you’re not familiar with visual search (and I wasn’t in this context), it’s search and retrieval instigated by the searcher “showing” a device or product like the one they’d like to buy (or if not buy, then get more information about). Here’s an example: shop for dog food by showing your device the near-empty bag of dog food in your pantry, and then buy it from Amazon or another online retailer. Go ahead and look into the Amazon Echo Look for a visual-search-type device that’s almost to market.

If we as marketers understand that text-based search is trending-down-to-obsolete over the next two years, and that our customers will be searching with their voices and images, what do we do to evolve our marketing strategies?

Director of Account Strategy at Marketing Refresh, Katy Katz, and VP of Industry Insights at Yext, Duane Forrester, shared their plans of attack for exactly that with the rapt audience at Pubcon Las Vegas this week…

Links are the fabric of the web. And in the SEO world, how we view them and earn them has changed dramatically in the past 20 years.

If you’re in the business of attracting traffic to a website and building brand awareness, you should care about how links impact your key performance indicators. As an SEO agency, we’ve written about how to get high quality backlinks in the SEO Tutorial. That resource covers link building best practices in black and white. But where personal experience and opinion is concerned, we have our own view of how links should be managed.

While we are sure some people will disagree with some of these views, we created this declaration that outlines what we hold true when it comes to web links.

If you’re a WordPress publisher, you have many options for boosting your search engine optimization. You may be using Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, or another plugin to help you cover many SEO bases for the content you publish.

However, as I’ve been pointing out through this series of posts, current SEO plugins don’t go far enough. A lot of enhancements are needed to take you from just “best practices” to targeted and specific guidance that shows you how to get the maximum visibility for each of your posts.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I explained gaps that currently exist between SEO plugins available and the needs today. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for well over a year, as well as dreaming, planning and developing …

Now in this Part 3 post, I’m pleased to share a solution that has been months in the making.

The Bruce Clay SEO plugin for WordPress brings the power of our proprietary SEO diagnostic tools to the WordPress environment. And it adds search ranking and analytics performance metrics to the WordPress interface.

The combination of the new plugin and the SEOToolSet™ powering it is a MASSIVE difference-maker. We set out to “bridge the gaps” and enable any WordPress copywriter, editor or publisher to implement smarter SEO improvements, monitor their content’s reach, and much more.

Are there certain things you wish you could accomplish with your SEO in WordPress, but the functionality is just not there? Me, too.

Last time I wrote about WordPress SEO enhancements, I talked about the popularity of WordPress as a platform for some of the world’s best-known websites. I also discussed the challenges that WordPress presents for doing SEO effectively, further challenged by the gap in functionality of SEO plugins out there today.

So I created a list of WordPress SEO enhancements we wish we had. Today, I’ll outline five more WordPress SEO enhancements you wish you had and why.

WordPress is the most popular content management system out there and powers more than a quarter of the world’s websites. Huge brands are hosted on it, like TechCrunch and BBC America. You likely have a WordPress site, too.

The fact that it’s open source and easy to use makes it desirable for all types of brands, businesses and professionals. Enter WordPress plugins — one of the easiest ways to customize the functionality of a WordPress site. At the time of writing, there are almost 52,000 to choose from.

However, WordPress is not SEO enabled by default, and finding the right plugins to help you accomplish everything you want in SEO can be a challenge.

Whether you use Yoast’s WordPress SEO, All in One SEO Pack, Ultimate SEO, or other plugins, you probably have many needs covered — like being able to craft custom titles, meta descriptions and slugs for your posts. But beyond these basics, does your plugin:

HQ Hours of Operation:
8:30am to 5:30 pm Pacific timeDays of Operation:
Monday through Friday — email works other times in many casesSupport Operations:
M-F 9:00 to 5:00 Email Support FormTraining Facility:
Please see the training facility map